Full disclosure.
I am a Newsmax TV contributor.
But I write this as a conservative — and as someone who has observed the serious rise of conservative media over time.
The prompting for this column was the invitation to be present on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday as Newsmax, the conservative cable TV network created by longtime journalist Christopher Ruddy, became listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
To say the least, this did not go unnoticed. Here’s a sample headline, this one from the International Business Times: “Conservative Cable Channel Nmax Surges Over 700 percent on the First Day of NYSE Trading: The company recently closed at $75 million IPO.”
The IBT reported:
Newsmax (NYSE:NMAX), founded by Christopher Ruddy in 1998, went public yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange after U.S. President Donald Trump‘s election boosted the conservative TV news outlet’s ratings and network audience.
Newmax’s IPO success shares similarities with the performance of other companies associated with conservative media, including video-sharing platform Rumble (NASDAQ:RUM) and Trump Media & Technology Group (NASDAQ:DJT), which rallied in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.
The stock price opened late Monday morning at £10.87 ($14) apiece after pricing its class B common shares at £7.76 ($10) apiece to raise £58.22 million ($75 million). Soon after, Nmax shares surged over 735 percent to close at £64.84 ($83.51) on Monday and are up another 41 percent during Tuesday’s pre-market hours, surpassing a £10.09 billion ($13 billion) valuation.
The Florida-based company began as a digital brand before announcing its cable news channel over a decade ago. Newsmax also offers free streaming through its app and YouTube.
The reporting goes on about the standout success that Newsmax has become.
And also to the point, the success of Newsmax is yet another chapter in the rise of conservative media in all its forms, from talk radio to cable TV to magazines and newspapers.
In fact, in the latter category, it should be recalled that there was no conservative media until a young rebel named William F. Buckley Jr. stunned the liberal media with the introduction of his National Review magazine in 1955. Buckley would eventually expand the conservative media brand when he founded, on PBS of all places, the television show Firing Line.
Just over a decade later in 1967, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. founded the very site you are reading — The American Spectator. Along with Wladyslaw Pleszczynski, Bob and Wlady, as they are known to all at the magazine, created yet another conservative media success in the world of journalism.
And the conservative media world kept growing. In 1988, Rush Limbaugh had his local radio show syndicated nationally — and it took off. Rush demonstrated without a doubt that there was a considerable market out there for conservative talk radio and, well beyond that, for conservative media in general.
The very success of dozens and dozens of local talk radio shows around the country, not to mention Sean Hannity’s national show and that of Rush’s successors Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, is telling. So too the success of Glenn Beck. When they are tied to the success now of cable TV and, in a 21st-century invention, the world of podcasts and websites, it illustrates just how far conservative media has come since Bill Buckley’s 1955 venture with National Review and Bob Tyrrell’s 1967 founding of The American Spectator.
Interestingly, the 1980 invention of 24-hour cable TV news by Ted Turner, who started that world with the founding of CNN, has expanded even further. Unwitting as it may have been at first, as CNN tilted more and more left, it virtually invited a conservative response. And arrive that response did with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News.
But the world does not stand still.
Now comes Chris Ruddy’s sweeping success with Newsmax, built on the experiences and lessons learned from conservative media predecessors.
As Americans learn daily — almost hourly — the world around America, not to mention across America itself, is changing. Sometimes, it would seem, those changes are coming almost hourly.
And that exactly is why Newsmax has become such a surging success. In the very long ago, there was a popular detective TV show called Dragnet. It starred actor Jack Webb as Detective Joe Friday. And Detective Friday’s famous line when interviewing a witness or suspect was: “The facts. Just the facts.”
That is exactly what Newsmax is about, as I have learned first hand. And that, in turn, is what is powering Newsmax to its well deserved success.
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